and the Calf, he was the calf butting his head against the mighty
oak. He acted not to dislodge the oak, but because he had to act—
if nothing else—as a witness against the brutality of the Stalinist
system. His three-volume history of the gulag was a literary success
for the author and a major ideological defeat for the Soviet Union.
The book discredited the communist parties of western Europe,
forcing intellectuals to consider the crimes of the Stalin era with the
moral and intellectual rigor they had once reserved only for Adolf
Hitler’s Germany.
Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Solzhenitsyn returned to
Russia in 1994. While respected as a historian and intellectual, he has
not played a major role in the development of a new Russia under
Boris Yeltsinor Vladimir Putin. Rather, he has been seen as a relic
of an ancient and forgotten age. Nevertheless, Solzhenitsyn in his
novels and by personal example forced millions of Americans and
Europeans to consider the human cost of the Soviet regime. He was
one of the few to realize that ideas could shatter a regime’s legitimacy.SOPRUNENKO, PETR KARPOVICH (1908–1992). Soprunenko
was transferred from the Red Army to the NKVDin November 1938
as Lavrenty Beriarebuilt the security service. In April 1940 he was
assigned responsibility for the executionof 25,700 Polish military
officers and civilians held at Katynand other camps. Every day he
submitted a report to Beria detailing the day’s killings. Soprunenko
was rewarded and promoted for his work as an executioner. He was
made a major general in 1945. Soprunenko continued to work as a
commander of forced labor camps engaged in military work. He es-
caped arrest in the aftermath of Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 and re-
tired in 1963.SORGE, RICHARD (1895–1944). A frontline veteran of World War
I, Sorge was an ideological convert to Stalinism. In the 1930s, under
cover as a journalist, Sorge served as a Soviet military intelligence
(GRU)illegalin China and then in Japan. In Tokyo in the late 1930s,
he became close to the German ambassador and had access to official
Nazi military and diplomatic dispatches. He also developed a num-
ber of important sources in the Japanese establishment, who provided
detailed information about Japanese military planning and were able246 •SOPRUNENKO, PETR KARPOVICH (1908–1992)06-313 P-Z.qxd 7/27/06 7:57 AM Page 246